Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 3/15/2025

1. Fabula Ultima Atlas: Natural Fantasy
2. Warhammer 40k Roleplay: Imperium Maledictum: Macharian Requisition Guide
3. Tome of Worldbuilding
4. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: High Elf Player’s Guide
5. Grimwild: Cinematic Fantasy Roleplaying

From the Archives

There’s a lot of discussion around the typical notion of RPG systems, both from here and elsewhere. I find that one stake in the ground that is self-evident (though admittedly not to everyone) is that in order to talk about RPG systems in any meaningful way, we need to start by conceding that at an 80% level the vast majority of games we play are essentially the same. From the archives this week I’m bringing back The Five Mechanic Game, written three years ago. Barring a few exceptions (and certain separate categories like solo games), every traditional RPG is built around five mechanics: Character creation, task resolution, game mastering, combat, and one genre-relevant subsystem. When you break down games into these five, you quickly begin to see that the universe of true differences (things more involved than which dice you use) can usually fit on a single page for each.

Discussion of the Week

How do you prevent your Big Bad from being immediately outsmarted by the players?: I want to point out a fascinating cultural shift that the linked discussion is emblematic of. When I started playing in the early 2000s, the hobby was still recovering from an embedded expectation that GMs would play in an adversarial way, keep the game on rails, kill the characters if they get out of line. Now, the dominant cultural meme is a group of players running roughshod over their hapless GM. Ultimately, this is a good thing: The GM memes of the 90s were toxic enough that they basically inspired a movement of GM-less games. That said, aspiring GMs everywhere need to remember: In the traditional dynamic of a roleplaying game, you always win. Your ‘you win’ buttons are multitudinous and starkly unfair, even if you don’t do anything truly underhanded. The trick for any GM is not to win, it’s to help the players have more fun by convincing them that you could beat them if it wasn’t for them.

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